0Being The Ricardos (Amazon Prime)
Starring Nicole Kidman ,Javier Bardem ,J. K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, and Clark Gregg
Directed by Aaron Sorkin
Rating: *** ½
If you are a fan of Lucille Ball’s Here’s Lucy and a fan of Nicole Kidman—and I confess to being both—this film’s most unusual format of storytelling may still not appeal to you.Writer-director Aaron Sorkin takes us behind the scenes to witness the hustbustle , the politics and the numbing emotional dynamics during the shooting of one week of the everlasting serial.
I Love Lucy ran for a record-breaking 6 years , plus innumerable re-runs. It is probably the most successful television sitcom of all times.
Lucille Ball’s stardom was heartbreakingly conditional.She was the queen of the small screen. Bur cinema largely snubbed her . There is an episode in this wonderfully insightful film where Lucille is offered a film because the original choice (Rita Hayworth, I think) is not available. The film, though critically acclaimed, did nothing for Lucille’s film career.
In another heartbreaking corkscrew twist Lucille, as played by Nicole Kidman, confesses she allowed the series to go on for so long only to have her husband by her side .
A marriage with so many cracks that any shred of commitment could slip through them.This is what Being The Ricardos brings out with such giggly gravity. The film, a labour of love if ever there was one , tells us why showbiz marriage need hearts of steel and balls of iron to survive.
It doesn’t spare Lucy or us any of her nerveshatteting disenchantments. At the same time the film is more a homage than a critique of celebrity marriage. Both Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are excellent as Lucille Ball her flamboyant flirtatious husband Desi Arnez. But the plot is owned by Kidman’s Lucy.
What I specially liked about Kidman(okay, I like everything about her , but still…) is that she nowhere tries to imitate Lucille Ball.We’ve all grown up watching Lucille Ball. Everyone would agree Lucy is inimitable. Kidman doesn’t even go there. She confers her own interpretation on the character, imbuing the evanescence of the bubbly surface with undertones of dark tragedy that swim just beneath the bustling surface.
The supporting cast I also very very cogent. But the real hero of the show is the writer. Aaron Sorkin has formatted this fine feel-blue film with elements of documentary filmmaking: we have actors playing the older versions of the younger characters pretending to the real characters . It’s like faking a documentary.
Only, there is nothing fake about the crises that the Lucy Show’s crew faces when Lucille Ball is discovered to be a closet communist. Or when Lucy discovers she is pregnant and (predictably) the team is more concerned about the future of the show than the mother-to-be.
There is a layer of intense friction between Lucille Ball and the actress who plays her landlady-friend(played superbly by Nina Arianda). Because this is film-within-film with actors playing actors, it is very difficult to describe the elegant chaos of the creative juices that flow behind the scenes of a successful show, sweeping relationships away in the tides.